Below the Line: Set Decorator Mindy Smith

It’s a relaxed overcast day in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting in Patys Restaurant, a decades-old touchstone of the film industry in Toluca Lake. This quaint old-Hollywood diner has also hosted four generations of Smith family.

Mindy Smith grew up ensconced in Hollywood culture. She continued her family’s creative legacy, becoming a dancer before moving into design and set decoration. She has worked on movies, TV shows, music videos, and commercials. Her path has been a winding one, impacted by injuries and redirections, yet holding fast to its artistic thread.

Note: Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Aminah Hughes: Mindy, thanks for hanging out with me in this pillar of history. You’re primarily a set decorator, and you have done production design on smaller projects, but you started out as a dancer. Tell me about that.

Mindy Smith: I started out as a dancer because my mother was a dancer. She was also a scenic artist. So was my dad. My whole family was in the industry. My great-aunt, Bernice, was friends with Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin. She was incredible. Nobody thought she would live past thirty. She owned three speakeasies, had three different husbands, got shot, stabbed, and she lived till she was ninety-seven. She was the oldest sister to my grandpa and outlived everybody.

I grew up in L.A., seventh generation Californian, Indigenous blood from Northern California. One of my ancestors was a tracker. I was a very hyper kid. I had a lot of energy. So, my mom thought, let's try and get her a dance class. But I was a tomboy, and I hated dance class. I hated the buns, the tights, the black leotards. All the girls were so prissy. Nobody wanted to go surfing with me. I would rip my tights and get kicked out of class.

But then, when I was seven, I did my first show. Those curtains opened, and the lights shone, and I found my center. I felt so connected to the earth and to myself and, from that moment on, I was a little protege dancer.

I danced in companies and was on my way to Broadway when, at the age of fourteen, I was hit by a car. I broke fifteen bones in my body. They said I’d never dance again. I ignored the doctor and started training with a body cast on—I was raised very metaphysical. My mom said, “you’re going to dance again.”

I didn’t have very much bend in my back, so, I was turned on to more jazz funk. I became one of the token white girl hip hoppers in 90s L.A. I worked at Disneyland, in honor of my parents—I was Pluto and danced in “A Mickey’s Christmas Carol.” I was a roller-skating waitress, I went out to Vegas and did drag. I was twenty-one when I came back from Vegas.

Then, in the early 2000s, I got a really bad head injury that punctured my brain and took away partial memory. That ended my dance career.

Aminah: The story about your grandmother and everything she survived, I feel like this is part of your family legacy. To go through extraordinary challenges—physical, emotional—and keep on keeping on.

Mindy: Yeah, because my mom went through the same kind of stuff. Wow. I never even thought about that, Aminah. You’re good. I need to pay you $130 an hour.

Aminah: I'll take it. We're opening up some stuff today.

Mindy: I guess so, because when I got hit by that car, I was going to kiss a boy behind the library, Sean Coyle. I was one of eight people walking across the street after school. There were three people in between me and the car, and I'm the only one who was hit. My mom always says that it's because the universe knew that I would be okay. I've always felt like a protector in some ways, and I think that means sometimes getting hit by things.

Aminah: How did you transition into the next part of your creative journey?

Mindy: I was in my 20s. I got into the UCLA Extension program, to get a certificate for interior and environmental design. My mother is a beautiful designer. She worked for Disney and Universal, and some of the things that she would paint and create, it just, you know, it inspired me.

Aminah: What was her role at Disney and Universal?

Mindy: She was one of the early female scenic artists at Disney. She worked on the EPCOT theme park, the new Fantasyland in the late 70s, painted Pirates of the Caribbean. She was part of the mainframe of early scenic artists in an industry that didn't really take women at the time.

Aminah: So, she painted for Disneyland?

Mindy: Yeah, at Disneyland itself, at the park. She worked on Euro Disney, Adventureland. I would come home from school, and she'd be painting suitcases and characters …

Aminah: She was one of the early Imagineers.

Mindy: She really was, I remember my grandmother taking me over there, and she'd be on a rig, thirty feet up. She’d be like, “Hi sweetie, I'll be right down,” just doing a perfect straight line, something that seemed so menial, and then, you know, a week later, it was this incredible set for one of the rides at Disneyland. I grew up at Disneyland. She was a young twenty-something with two kids. We were poor hippie kids, living in cars, jumping from place to place, living an incredible Cali life. It really shaped me artistically. She always gave us a wall to paint on or to draw on, no matter where we were. Art was everything. I never felt poor because we always had art.

Aminah: That's lovely. So, you became interested in interior design but ended up moving into set decoration in film. Tell me about that journey.

Mindy: I started school in the 90s, I was twenty-three. I got two years under my belt, I loved it, but I got a traveling show where I got to play Velma Kelly in Chicago. It was a dream, which was interesting because I'm not a singer like you, so I have no idea how they got me to sing, but they did pretty good. I had good trainers. So, I left school for this show. And then, I had the head trauma. I felt very sorry for myself. I’d already lost the love of my life in dancing, and now I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I had thought I would get my design degree, maybe open a studio somewhere outside of Seattle. I didn't plan on falling in love and getting married, but I did. I taught dance, I survived cancer and another horrible accident, this time in a car. After I dropped out of design school, I realized I wanted to do sets.

It was Christmas time and Into the Woods (the 2014 film, starring Meryl Streep) had come out. It was a symbiotic relationship of scenic work and CGI, actual people doing the work with their hands. And having two parents who were scenic artists … I started crying. when you find your calling, it really hits.

Aminah: Yeah. I've had that experience a couple of times. So, how did you get your start in set dec?

Mindy: I was working in a bar with my husband. There was a private event upstairs in our speakeasy lounge. They were shooting a pilot for some kind of reality show, and they needed an on-air bartender. The way they’d dressed the bar, it looked incredible. Traci (Hays, the director and producer) popped up from behind the bar. You know how spunky she is.

Aminah: I do.

Mindy: Well, I said, “My name is Mindy, and you’re gonna hire me. I’m the bartender today, but I want to be a set decorator.” I watched everything she was doing, and I got this excitement in my belly. That stillness when you just know that something is happening in this moment on your path of destiny. Her energy made me happy. She was so young and vibrant and quirky, but so in control. She's a wonderful art director. She's a survivor, too.

Aminah: She took you under her wing.

Mindy: Yes. I took her to breakfast so I could rack her brain. First, she brought me on as an unpaid intern to do a Ninja Sex Party music video. I've done three of their videos. I got to do art. I got to do all this fun stuff.

After that she hired me. I thought I knew a lot about the art department because I would go to Universal Studios when my mom was doing stuff, but I didn't know anything. I didn't sleep. I read the script, I looked up all of the prop houses, not knowing that they all work differently.

I was shopping at first, then they needed a set decorator. That’s how I got my start.

Art, design, dancing, it's all the same. It's choreography, it's rhythm. In movies and theatre, the actor is your center, right? And everything around them is directing the viewer's eye within the space. It’s through the art, design, lighting, wardrobe, makeup, the era, that they can understand who the character is.

Even if cognitively they're not understanding that all these things are running through their brain, it's like this perfect, beautiful, circular dance that brings the focus back to what's happening on screen. I love that.

I would try things and they would either work or not work. It was a learning curve. There were a lot of tears on my part but, as you know, there’s no crying on set.

Aminah: A lot of tears in the car.

Mindy: Yep. You cry in the morning in the shower.

Aminah: On the way to work, on the way home … unless you're friends with the makeup department, and you can have a quick cry in the bathroom, and then they’ll fix you up.

Mindy: Which did happen a couple of times.

Aminah: The amazing thing about art or lighting or music, or anything in film, is that nobody notices your work if it’s good.

Mindy: You only notice it if it really sticks out. But most people would only notice it if it's bad. And that—to be invisible—is to do my job well.

Aminah: What was the biggest film you worked on?

Mindy: The biggest film I did was Little White Lies. It starred Kate Hudson and Michael Shannon. The director was lovely, and it was right before the shutdown, Traci and I had just come back from Syracuse doing a movie with Tosca (Musk, the director, producer, and sister to Elon) and her production company, Passionflix.

We were on the plane reading the script for Little White Lies. My husband, Sean, picked us up and drove us straight to the production designer’s house. It was all boom, boom, boom. Our last day of work was March 20th, then we were shut down because of COVID. We were in our last week of filming, huge set, but then it all stopped.

We came back in 2021, right before we went to Atlanta to shoot two more films with Tosca. One of them was Traci’s feature directing debut, Tangles, which was incredible. I did the set decoration.

We ended up filming in Redlands, California, so we all stayed up there. The good old days—being so busy you don't sleep. Those were two of my last films. I came home with COVID and filming in Atlanta was very tough. I decided I was done with film. I was just going to do commercials.

Aminah: You did commercials for a long time.

Mindy: A long time. I love doing commercials. They’re like vignettes. Design at its finest. I love the communication between movement and art and this kind of life in between (Mindy indicates the messy table where we have taken over a back corner of Paty’s, covered in coffee cups, napkins, sugar packets, notebooks, and my reading glasses).

It was just fascinating to me.

Traci taught me to have fun and overdo it, because it’s easier to take away than to add. I had to learn that it was not my vision, but that I was lucky enough to be a part of the creation of someone else’s vision.

At first, I was fighting the process. I didn’t go to film school; I was studying fine art and design. I was used to seeing everything, but all they want is what’s going to be in the frame.

At one point, I was told I was making it too hard on myself. I remember the moment when it clicked. I looked into the lens, and then I looked around at the art department, and I realized we did that as a team.

Aminah: From dance to set dec, you have these through-lines of collaboration, of being a part of a creative team.

Mindy: And of working with art. Even on commercials, you have to find a creative way for the viewer to understand a product. I think that’s cool. You learn how to set it, how to view it, the way to light it. It was almost like making films on a miniature level. There's something really cool about that. And in those days, we were working with a lot of influencers because of the strike. So, while other people were not working, that first year, I worked. I think we did like 15 or 16 commercials the first year of the strike. It was incredible.

I missed my motion picture insurance and being a part of the union, but it was great pay. I loved that it was smaller. I could actually see my friends and family. I thought maybe I’d have another ten years of it. I thought the same thing with dancing. And we're artists. Of course it's not going to work that smoothly.

Aminah: Yes. It's a rocky road.

Mindy: When the strikes happened, I realized I needed to pivot again. I decided to go back and get my masters. I started working with art and movement. I wanted to use art therapy to give back to people like myself, PTSD patients, children with special needs. I just knew that I wanted to end my life doing something in service. So, I’m getting the rest of my credentials, and in the meantime, I’m writing a rock opera.

Aminah: So, you’re using a combination of your skills to help people, but you’re still creating.

Mindy: If I can help one person have a better life through art and movement and the things that saved my life … I’m a fifty-two-year-old woman who doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. I used to feel really embarrassed by that, but now I feel empowered it.

There’s a struggle, there's pain, but there's also a beauty inside of that. I watched my mother, this beautiful soul, I watched her struggle, but through her struggle came her art. There was so much beauty in how she allowed us to be wholeheartedly ourselves.

I was the real-life Punky Brewster. I even had the pigtails.

Aminah: My mom is the same. She's very supportive of everything I do. She says, “Well, whatever you want to do, I'll support you, and I think you're amazing.”

Mindy: How lucky we are to have that.

*Images compliments of Mindy Smith